Umuganda

Perhaps unique to Rwandan life is the practice of umuganda, which can be translated as “coming together to achieve a common purpose”. On the last Saturday of every month, all Rwandese between 18 and 65 are expected to spend 3 to 4 hours working together on community projects. It’s considered unacceptable to be out and about during the hours of umuganda if you’re not taking part, and anyway there would be nothing to do as all shops, public transport and pretty much everything else shuts down. That said, I’ve met a lot of people so far who use the umuganda morning as an excuse for a big night out on Friday and a long lie in on Saturday morning!

Yesterday MASS participated in umuganda at the site of the pre-primary school which we are building for ChildFund, at Jabana on the outskirts of Kigali. The school needs to be open for the start of the school year in mid-August, but is running behind programme and over budget. To try to move things along, the local community turned out to get their hands dirty.

The MASS umuganda team – me, Rosie, Noella, Sarah, Alexia, Josh, James, Crystelle and Christian (plus Yves who took the photo)

The main task was regrading a slope to a safe angle. This slope was originally designed to be supported by a retaining wall, but budget constraints mean the wall has been scrapped. I think they may get a few issues with soil erosion during the rainy season, but the client has decided to take the risk, and we’ll do our best to mitigate it by installing drainage and vegetating the slope.

Somehow I ended up attempting to supervise about 50 people with hoes and shovels as they hacked away at the slope. To begin with things seemed like total chaos, with people digging seemingly at random and of course the language barrier didn’t help me to explain what I wanted. I managed to get a couple of lengths of wood cut as a template to show people how the slope should be stepped back, and gradually people understood what we were aiming for.

By the end of the morning we had one end of the slope pretty much finished. The contractor can now use the finished end as an example to complete the rest next week.

Once the hard work was finished, the community gathered around their village mayor for a debrief. The mayor gave a long speech, followed by speeches from a representative of ChildFund and then from Rosie, who leads the MASS engineering team. Alexia and Noella, two MASSers who speak Kinyarwanda, translated bits and pieces for me. There was apparently lots of emphasis on the importance of the school and education in general, and on the community’s role in ensuring their children attend. Elections are coming up next week, so the meeting ended with a run down of the candidates, and a fairly firm recommendation of which one people should be voting for!

The community meeting; and Rosie’s speech

Fanta Friday

Every Friday afternoon, the MASS office gets together either for a presentation or a site visit along with a few “fantas” (= beers). This week we went to visit the new Kigali cricket ground, designed by MASS and currently under construction. People had been muttering all week about vaulted masonry construction so I was expecting something pretty interesting, but I wasn’t prepared for how amazing the structure looks.

The new pavilion, bar and changing rooms will be housed in three vaulted masonry structures. Each one is shaped as a parabola, one large, one medium and one small. Standing alongside each other they are meant to echo the path of a ball bouncing three times. The vaults are built from layers of thin tiles, overlapping with gypsum and cement mortar in between. The structures will then be finished with ceramic tiles which will not just look great but also provide waterproofing.

We met the master mason who has been brought in from New Zealand for 6 weeks to teach the local masons the techniques of building with these tiles. He’s about to go back home and the local team will finish the job.

We also got to walk around on the pitch, which is certainly the flattest piece of ground I’ve seen in Rwanda so far!

From speaking to Rwandese colleagues it seems that cricket is not particularly popular here. They do have a national team but people seem a little bemused about the construction of this new ground. It will be interesting to see whether this can be used to encourage more interest in the sport, along the lines of the recent growth of cycling, or whether the money could have been better spent elsewhere.

Gahinga hike

This weekend a group of us went to climb Gahinga, one of Rwanda’s volcanos. At 3,474 m above sea level it is the lowest and easiest. We set off on Saturday afternoon, the 10 of us crammed into two cars, to drive for about 2.5 hrs to the town of Musanze, in the far north. There we had dinner in a very tasty Italian restaurant (bizarre), and after a certain amount of driving around lost in the dark, arrived at a guest house close to the base of the mountain, where we got bed and breakfast for the princely sum of RWF10,000 (£10).

The next morning we woke up early and were at the park registration centre for 7am. Entry to the national parks in Rwanda is tightly controlled and you have to take a guide. We met our guide, Bosco, and then drove for about 45 minutes over dirt roads to the trailhead at around 2,300 m. There we met several guards with guns and machetes, who would walk with us. The guns are for elephants and buffalo, and the machetes are for the vegetation.

The first part of the walk felt hard – steep and in full sun. After about 50 minutes we entered a bamboo forest which covers the middle slopes, and all my tiredness was forgotten. It was cool and shady, and after the constant dust of the Rwandan dry season, it was nice to feel mud under my feet! We continued climbing, and as we emerged from the bamboo forest the gradient steepened. Eventually we needed to pull on trees and roots to make progress and I was glad of the bamboo walking pole that one of the guards had cut for me.

After about 3 hours of walking, we emerged onto the summit. Gahinga is dormant, and the crater is now filled with a swamp. The summit was very beautiful, lush, green and peaceful with lots of birds. We ate lunch there and then descended by the same route. On the way back through the bamboo forest we were lucky enough to see a troop of golden monkeys swinging through the bamboo above our heads. Bosco told us they are endemic only to that region.

On the descent we also had great views of Mount Sabinyo, another higher volcano which has three summits and involves ladders and scrambling on the ascent. I can’t wait to try that one!

First view of Mount Gahinga

The magical bamboo forest

An elephant footprint! We saw loads of these.

The crater swamp. Actually it’s not that swampy, at least in the dry season. I walked across and kept my feet dry.

Looking across to Uganda from the summit.

Picnic on Mount Gahinga (it’s much easier when you don’t have to escape from a PoW camp to do it).

Sabinyo – the next objective!

Week 2

I need to think of more exciting blog titles…

The second week definitely felt easier than the first, as I got into more of a routine. I spent a lot of the week working with Shakira on bearing capacity calculations. She is working on the design of shallow foundations for a school development in Ruhehe, in the north of Rwanda. The school buildings themselves are relatively straightforward, being single storey reinforced concrete frames. But things are complicated by the architects’ vision, which involves constructing a 5 m high freestanding wall as a visual feature when approaching the site. This site is in Rwanda’s volcanic region and lots of construction in the area is done with locally available volcanic stone. The architects want to use this for their wall. Being a seismic area, we also have to design for earthquake loading, which means that the foundations for this wall are quite tricky to design.

Shakira has around 1 year’s experience with MASS, and has done quite a bit of site supervision as well as getting introduced to structural engineering and seismic design by Rosie. Her degree course didn’t cover any geotechnical engineering or soil mechanics, so we had to start from scratch. For me it was a really useful exercise to see what existing knowledge she has and how best to build on that to improve her understanding. By the end of the week, Shakira had produced hand calculations to size the pad foundations, and she’s now working on a spreadsheet to carry out the calculations for her in future. It was great to see her gain confidence in her abilities.